Justice Dept stunner: 200% jump in non-citizen arrests

The Justice Department appears to be confirming what President Trump argued all along about non-citizens in the U.S. A shocking new report shows that 64 percent of federal arrests made are of non-citizens.

(Image: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)

More to the point — the number of federal arrests of non-Americans rose a staggering 234 percent over the last 20 years, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In contrast, federal arrests of U.S. citizens rose just 10 percent for the same time period from 1998 to 2018. But immigration advocates contend that since many of the arrests were immigration-related and not violent crimes, the administration is wrong.

The upsurge in the number of arrests is due to the fact that illegal entry and re-entry by migrants are being prosecuted with more frequency, according to Immigration expert Jessica M. Vaughan, the Washington Examiner reported.

“Experience has taught the immigration agencies and DOJ that this works to reduce recidivism – in other words, when illegal crossers face some more severe consequence than just being sent back home, they don’t keep doing it,” the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies said.

But the growing number of foreign criminal organizations in the U.S. may also be a factor as the arrests of noncitizens jumped 87 percent from 2017 to 2018.

The Washington Examiner reported:

Over that 20-year period, groups such as MS-13 have surged, first in urban areas and recently into rural communities, and drug and human trafficking have also increased over the U.S.-Mexico border.

Justice was very pointed in comparing U.S. citizens arrested to noncitizens. For example, it noted that while they make up just 7% of the U.S. population, noncitizens account for 15% of the arrests by federal authorities, 24% of drug arrests, 25% of federal property arrests, including 28% of all federal fraud arrests.

Immigration enforcement still appears to be the focus for federal authorities as the Department of Homeland Security made the majority of the arrests which were mostly for immigration crimes.

“20 years, 95% of the increase in federal arrests was due to immigration crimes. From 1998 to 2018, federal immigration arrests increased 5-fold (from 20,942 to 108,667), rising more than 50,000 in one year from 2017 to 2018,” the Justice Department said.

“The five crime types for which non-U.S. citizens were most likely to be prosecuted in U.S. district court in 2018 were illegal reentry (72 percent of prosecutions), drugs (13 percent of prosecutions), fraud (4.5 percent), alien smuggling (4 percent), and misuse of visas (2 percent),” the report said.

“In 2018, non-U.S. citizens accounted for 24 percent of all federal drug arrests and 25 percent of all federal property arrests, including 28 percent of all federal fraud arrests,” the report indicated.

And while pro-immigration advocates push the narrative that illegal immigrants are not committing crimes, Vaughan said that is simply not the case.

“Opponents of immigration enforcement are obsessed with trying to establish that illegal aliens and legal immigrants commit fewer crimes than Americans, and so, as their narrative goes, local law enforcement agencies should not cooperate with ICE and should adopt sanctuary policies,” she said.

“This is first of all not true, but is off-point and a dangerous conclusion,” Vaughan warned.

“What these numbers show is that there are certain types of crime that are disproportionately associated with illegal aliens: drug trafficking, certain gang crimes, and identity theft and document fraud,” she told the Washington Examiner.